Juscelino Kubitschek

Juscelino Kubitschek promised fifty years of progress in five and built a capital in the middle of an empty plateau to prove it. He was born in Diamantina in Minas Gerais to a schoolteacher widowed early, trained as a doctor, served as a field surgeon in the 1932 constitutionalist revolt, and rose through Minas politics as mayor of Belo Horizonte and then state governor, where he commissioned Oscar Niemeyer's first major buildings at Pampulha. Elected president in 1955 against military attempts to prevent his taking office, he governed on a Programme of Targets covering energy, transport, industry and education, and brought in foreign carmakers on terms that created a Brazilian motor industry from nothing. The capital was the target that was not on the list of practicalities: the constitution had specified an interior capital since 1891, and he built it, with Lucio Costa's plan and Niemeyer's buildings, inaugurating Brasilia in April 1960, forty-one months after the first ground was broken. It was paid for by borrowing and by printing money, and inflation and foreign debt were his legacy along with the roads and the dams. He broke with the International Monetary Fund in 1959 rather than accept its conditions. His political rights were stripped by the military regime in 1964 and he spent years in exile in Europe. He died in a car crash on the Rio-Sao Paulo highway in 1976, and the funeral became a demonstration against the dictatorship. Brasilia was declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1987, the first modern city to be listed. He is buried there in a memorial designed by Niemeyer. The suspicion that the crash was arranged by the security services has never been substantiated and a 2014 inquiry found no evidence for it. His slogan of fifty years in five was accompanied by an inflation rate that reached thirty per cent by the time he left office.

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